


Bloodflow

by linguamortua



Category: The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019)
Genre: 1970s, Action/Adventure, Fix-It of Sorts, Hand Jobs, Infidelity, Loyalty, M/M, Pre-Canon, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 20:22:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21398104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: ‘You know what?' said Ari, folding his hands under his head and crossing his ankles. 'Going too far works for me.’On some level, Sammy has always figured that Ari will get him killed. And yet, somehow, he keeps coming back for more.
Relationships: Ari Levinson/Sammy Navon
Comments: 11
Kudos: 25





	Bloodflow

**Author's Note:**

> There are many bad things about this film, but my particular favourite bad thing was the way they wrote a tragic unrequited love story between Ari and Sammy, and then hastily no-homo'ed in the blonde lady so we didn't accidentally get the wrong idea. Anyway, I fixed it, you're welcome. The other problems with this movie are beyond my skills to repair.

_August 1971, Jerusalem_

It took Sammy a few tries to light the cigarette. The lighter sparked blue in the dark twice before it flamed orange. Then his hands were so relaxed that he missed the tip of the roll-up.

‘You’re a surgeon,’ Ari teased, white teeth standing out against his dark beard. ‘Get it together.’

‘Got it, got it.’ The cigarette finally lit and Sammy sucked greedily at it. He had rolled it just the way he liked it; slim, not too densely packed, and with a little cloves in the tobacco. If it was going to kill him, he figured, he’d do well to enjoy the process. Ari bought Marlboros. He was impatient like that. All the same, Ari reached out and plucked the smoke from Sammy’s fingers to take a couple of drags.

‘Yours always taste better.’

‘That’s what they tell me.’

‘You’re better at everything,’ said Ari, leaning over to kiss Sammy and then lovingly putting the roll-up back between Sammy’s lips. He was always like this afterwards. He got this way during, too: sweet, smothering.

‘Too far,’ Sammy told him, smiling anyway.

‘You know what?' said Ari, folding his hands under his head and crossing his ankles. 'Going too far works for me.’ Although his ribs were still blue and yellow with fading bruises, they evidently weren’t hurting much any more.

‘Mmm.’

‘No, it does.’ Ari grinned expansively again, happy, post-coital, still buzzing from a mission win.

‘Patching you up doesn’t work so well for me.’

‘Hardly bled.’

‘Don’t throw yourself off any more buildings.’

‘Only a ground floor window. And anyway, it was on _fire_.’

Sammy laughed. ‘You set it on fire.’

They had had to cover their tracks. Leave no evidence behind. Ari had taken the directive literally, and there had been no time for anything with more finesse. He’d carefully shorted some old wiring, helped the process along with a wad of paper towels and a half-can of lighter fluid from the kitchen. And they’d run, belting along back streets as thunder started to roll in the sky. Praying that the rain would be heavy enough to keep people indoors, limit visibility and stop their little inferno from spreading to the next buildings.

Luckily, Massawa was a port city. Practically a pleasure cruise back home once they’d called in their extraction team. The RIBs buzzing low across the water, spraying them with seawater and washing away the sweat and blood. With cold, trembling hands they’d climbed out into the cavernous lower decks of the Navy vessel, accepting the blankets wrapped around them, the strong, aromatic coffee in black flasks.

They’d laughed, relieved, alive.

Sammy was still relieved nearly two weeks later. More than he should be, for someone with his training. He smoked and brooded for a few minutes, eyes closed.

‘You know, we won’t be lucky forever,’ he said. He rolled over to put out his smoke in his abandoned coffee mug. It hissed and died.

‘I will,’ said Ari. Sammy’s sheets were pulled up over Ari’s hips; the night wasn’t all that warm and they were sweaty. But now Ari shoved them away and reached for Sammy. ‘We will. We’ll be lucky forever.’ He sounded giddy.

‘This isn’t possible,’ Sammy muttered, unable to let it go even as a joke. It was bad luck to talk like that and everyone knew it. All the same he submitted to Ari’s wandering hands, and then his mouth. And then Sammy was hard again, and Ari knew exactly what to do with him—and did it.

* * *

_March 1975, Jerusalem_

Ethan had known there was a high probability of the mission going bad, of course, but Ari was the golden child, the perfect son, so it went ahead anyway. It hadn’t mattered that Sammy had outlined at least three potentially devastating weaknesses in their ops planning. The expectation was that Ari would somehow pull a win out of his ass. Magical fucking thinking as policy.

‘If there are weak points, patch them up,’ Ethan had said eventually, exasperated. It was almost midnight and the ashtray was more than half-full. The table was littered with maps and lists, blueprints and dossiers, personnel folders and weather projections.

‘I’m concerned that I won’t have time to build familiarity and trust,’ Sammy said, trying again. ‘The guards need time to get bored with me and stop paying attention.’

‘_I’m_ getting bored with you,’ said Ethan, rubbing his eyes. ‘It doesn’t have to be perfect, Sammy. It just has to be good enough. Keep him alive for as long as it takes to get the information and get out. Ari will take care of the rest.’

_Take care of the rest._ That meant: kill an aging, sick man who had barely left his bed in a year. It meant: enter the building through the window that Sammy would leave open for Ari. It meant, as far as Ethan and Ari were concerned, clean up, tie up loose ends. Taking care of business in that way that Sammy refused to do. Ethan had argued strenuously that as Sammy wouldn’t be the man’s real doctor, the Hippocratic Oath wouldn’t apply. Sammy had expended all the capital he had on making sure he wouldn’t be the operative to kill the target. Which meant it was now a two-man job, plus surveillance support.

One person could be a rogue element, easily brushed under the carpet and disavowed by the service. Two required logistics.

So Sammy wouldn’t be killing anyone. He’d just be facilitating the death of a person who’d be, for a month, at least nominally under his medical care. It made Sammy nauseous. The argument that the man would give them intel that would save the lives of hundreds held little water with Sammy. After all, Ari would have to kill the man when their time was up, regardless of what Sammy had managed to get out of him. There was a strong possibility—too strong—that Sammy would spend a month plumbing the depths of a man slowly succumbing to cancer, addled by chemotherapy drugs, and come up with nothing.

And at the end of the month, Issam Alami, drug lord, human trafficker, murderer, would die regardless. With the head cut off the snake, Ethan would plan a strike against the rest of the family: the sons, the uncles, the brothers. All gathered, it was hoped, for the man’s funeral. In a stroke, they could swoop in and gather up the whole damn dynasty.

For this prize, Sammy would leave the window open and let Ari in to do his part. It was the job. But it was a bad job, rushed in the planning and necessarily under-resourced even with a two-man team.

‘Don’t worry,’ Ari told him as they left Ethan’s office. ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy, anyway.’

‘A dying man—that’s an enemy?’

‘Don’t be naive. You know what he’s done.’

‘I still think the son is a better choice.’

‘Fuck that.’ Ari said it immediately, like he’d been waiting to and already had it lined up in the chamber. They stepped into the elevator and Ari jabbed at the button for the parking level. ‘He’s not a better choice, it just wouldn’t tread on your conscience so much.’

‘Aren’t we allowed a conscience?’

‘Save it for private practice, doctor.’

‘Fuck you, too.’

Ari wasn’t done. ‘Think about how many people we could lose going head-to-head with the son. He’s practically holed up with a private army.’

‘In a location that’s almost certainly full of all the intel we could ever want,’ countered Sammy.

‘_Almost_ certainly.’

‘There are no certainties—is that what you want to hear?’

Ari left the elevator, shrugging one shoulder. ‘I don’t want to hear anything. I’ve heard enough.’ He didn’t look back as he said it.

‘Knowing that nothing’s certain and actively courting chaos are two different things, Ari.’ This late, there were only a couple of cars left. Sammy had parked right next to Ari. They unlocked their cars in unison. ‘Ari, come on.’

‘Get your head in the game, Sammy. I’ll see you at Ben Gurion on Friday morning.’ He slammed the door so hard that it felt like the echoing, percussive blast of a shotgun. Sammy watched him peel away, tires squealing around a corner. Driving way too fast, as always. It was only after the exit doors had opened and closed that Sammy started the engine of his own car.

Two days later, Ari was back in high spirits. From a seat at the coffee shop on the concourse, Sammy watched him stride through the airport with his backpack over one shoulder. On some level, Ari must have known how many people watched him go by: taller than most people, broad-shouldered, wearing a half-smile. Too beautiful for his own good in this line of work. The beard only helped somewhat. He caught sight of Sammy and his half-smile bloomed into a grin, as if they hadn’t argued forty-eight hours previously.

Storm clouds never hung around Ari Levinson for long. Sammy brooded on things. Ari never did. So as far as Ari was concerned, they’d both said their pieces and everything was back to normal.

‘Ready?’

Sammy held up his boarding passes in mute reply. He left the last, half-cold mouthful of coffee. It would probably upset his stomach, anyway. Ari talked at him all the way down the concourse to security, and through security, and during their hour-long wait to board. By now Sammy was accustomed to how Ari got before a job. All he had to do was make noises in the right places. Ari wasn’t even listening to his responses. Talking about his wife, his daughter, their kitchen renovation, his recent pistol requalification scores. Maybe buying a new car. The cute new secretary at the office. What he had, what he wanted, what he deserved. Ari had everything. Got everything.

Sammy couldn’t manage to hate him for it. Why shouldn’t Ari get everything he wanted? Didn’t he, Sammy, want that for Ari anyway?

He drank a gin and tonic on the plane, although strictly it was against policy to consume alcohol while in the field. What the hell. Ari never stinted himself like that.

It was one drink, so Sammy was sober by the time they touched down. His nerves were jangling, as they always did. Anticipation was worse than almost anything else; a complicated surgery, a parachute jump, a firefight. They passed through security without incident, which somehow made it worse. Something, Sammy was sure, was going to go wrong.

‘Everything’s fine,’ Ari murmured as they waited in the queue for separate cabs. He said it so softly that Sammy could barely hear it. It didn’t help, because now Sammy knew that he looked nervous. Clear sign of guilt. They shuffled forward in line. Everything was going fine, he told himself redundantly; everything was going fine because nothing had happened yet.

The next cab was his. He climbed in, gave directions in his passable French, and then tried to look like he was enjoying the scenery. Ari faded into the distance in the rear view mirror.

* * *

_April 1975, Tangiers_

Once they parted ways at the airport, Sammy was working alone for a while. Usually he’d relish that. Planning out his moves thoroughly. Except, Issam Alami was sicker than Sammy had anticipated. Every spare hour he’d had in the two days before flying to Morocco had been spent cramming with his old oncology textbooks, or on the phone with a talented friend in the field who tried valiantly to give him a crash course in recent developments in about three hours. Sammy could tell this guy was circling the fucking drain, yellow from liver failure, desperately thin. Still, they had him hooked up to all sorts of paraphernalia, which Sammy knew was barely doing anything at all at this stage.

As he stepped into the room, he deliberately brought to mind his dialect training and aligned his tongue in the correct way in his mouth.

‘Mr Alami,’ he said very gently, more gently than he would usually. ‘My name is John Gillespie.’ Just the gentlest hint of Scots; a well-bred man from the Old Country who’d spent his career in England. Unimpeachably correct, but audibly not English. He explained the entirely fabricated situation: the current doctor taken ill, the supposed relationship between Sammy and his predecessor. The man hardly heard him, although Sammy saw his eyes moving under the papery skin of his eyelids.

It was a miserable sickroom, underlit and with the window facing nothing but a bland expanse of scrub and grass. This was where Sammy would visit daily, providing medical care and trying to unpick the vast and sprawling criminal empire over which the much-reduced patriarch had once presided.

The house itself was subtly a fortress. Sammy was never unaccompanied when he visited, except when he was treating his patient. Even then, only quiet voices were possible if he didn’t want the guard outside the door to hear his conversations. There were at least six security people that he could count. Only the man at the front gate and the one outside the master bedroom were obvious. Fortunately, they were the same every time.

Sammy greeted them politely but blandly, the same boring routine every day. He had so little time to build a routine that he had to be as predictable and tedious as possible. For the first couple of days their curiosity was piqued by a new visitor, and the man who guarded Alami’s room tried to ask him some questions out of boredom. Sammy pretended to be absent-minded and brushed them off. Under this mundane cover, he set about the unsavoury process of lying—lying with every word and action, every gently-inflected Scottish vowel. He used his medical training to lie, following the treatment plan laid down by the doctor who had been conveniently removed from his position by the simple expedient of tampering with his living space and introducing toxic materials. Sammy administered medication, provided palliative care. And he listened. He listened to the rambling and often nonsensical stories his patient told.

Sammy had never considered becoming a psychiatrist. He didn’t have the patience, for one thing. He didn’t need to be one, though, to understand that his patient was repressing a colossal amount of incriminating information only through a lifetime of practice in secrecy and the extreme exertion of what will he had left. His brain was rotting as surely as was his body. More important, he felt guilty. A Catholic would surely be unburdened himself to a priest about now. But Alami had no father confessor. Carefully, quietly, Sammy began to inveigle his way into that role.

More lies. A doctor was a priest was a bartender anyway, he told himself. And Sammy had every reason to want his patient to talk to him of his own volition. Not least of all because if they could crack this target, they could potentially unlock the secrets of a drug and human trafficking operation that had its vicious claws in every port city around the Red Sea.

Tucked into the side interior pocket of his case, Sammy had two small vials of barbiturates, inaccurately marked as buprenorphine. He didn’t want to use them. He had strenuously argued with Ethan against their efficacy. But here he was lying to himself, too, because whether he used the drugs or not, whether he could crack the man’s puzzle-box brain or not, Ari would be following along behind him to take care of what Sammy couldn’t. Day after day, hour after hour, Sammy played his near-unwinnable game.

Today he had been sitting by Alami’s bedside for almost an hour, painstakingly taking observations and changing the man’s IV. He’d been accustomed to a crew of nurses silently doing that particular job for him, so he was careful and took his time, so he didn’t punch through the vein. He taped the cannula down and hung a fresh bag on the IV stand. The man’s mouth moved every now and then like he was about to start speaking, or thinking something that he wanted to say.

Sammy leaned in.

'I can't hear you,' he said softly. The man opened his milky, crusted eyes and looked vacantly in Sammy's direction. His mouth moved again and he coughed. Before Sammy could encourage him, he drifted back down into his drug-induced sleep.

Another failure; another day of reprieve.

Later, lying in his own surprisingly comfortable bed, Sammy curled onto his side, tucked one arm under the pillow and thought about Ari. Somewhere in the city, he would be waiting. Most likely pacing and nervy like a cat trapped inside.

‘Where are you, you asshole?’ he said quietly to himself into the dark.

He wanted Ari there. He wanted both of them out.

Alami was no closer to telling him anything than on day one; he seemed almost lucid some days and utterly demented others. Sammy couldn’t figure out the angle of approach. Nor could he find any kind of pattern in the man’s behaviour and symptoms. Even dropping suggestive breadcrumbs hadn’t yielded anything that could be called intelligence. And he was rarely left alone with Alami long enough to try any kind of pharmaceutical encouragement.

All of this ran through his mind constantly. Now, as Sammy packed up his small bag for the day, he was faintly aware that less than a week remained. He thought also, this with some amusement, about how very much he’d become Gillespie; his crisp, neat movements and his quiet precision. These were not always traits that came easy to Sammy. In fact he’d modelled his alias on an older uncle who he’d admired as a boy. Perhaps in doing so he was paying tribute to Uncle Elya, in a way.

He left the room and quietly closed the door behind him, as always stepping over the creaky floorboard. He was met in the hallway by a man he did not know.

‘Doctor Gillespie?’ The man loomed above Sammy, who was not a short man. Sammy arranged his face into benign politeness, smoothing away all of his rough edges.

‘Yes?’

‘You’ll come with us today.’ The man spoke in a quiet, calm voice, inflected with Tangiers French. He did not sound like a quiet or calm person, however.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘No problem.’

The man took Sammy’s arm and firmly led him down the stairs and out to the sweeping front drive. Before Sammy could formulate a protest or a strategy, he was seated in the back of a Jeep, his medical bag on the floor by his feet.

‘Can I ask where we’re going?’ He knew he sounded nervous, like a civilian doctor would.

‘We’re going to talk privately,’ said the man. He was sitting in the passenger seat, and he looked in the rear view mirror to meet Sammy’s eyes.

‘I have medical treatments to administer,’ Sammy protested. ‘Mr Alami is very poorly, and as his doctor I must—’

‘He will be taken care of.’

‘But my notes—’

‘You are not the only doctor in Tangiers, Doctor Gillespie.’

The engine growled to life and Sammy distinctly heard the click of the doors locking. He tried not to react as they pulled out of the property and took a left turn to an area of the city that Sammy didn’t know. He was bundled out of the car with the heavy, hard hand of one of the men pressing the back of his head down so that he couldn’t look around. For all that he could see, he might as well have been blindfolded. Still he tried to remember his training and take in as much as he could. The very faint smell of drains and of fried fish and asphalt. The cracked paving slabs with little shoots of plants or grass poking through. This was a less upmarket area of town.

In some doors and up some stairs, and then Sammy was thrown into a chair and tied. His medical bag ended up on a table by the door, and the door was locked from the inside with a sharp clatter of a bolt. All pretence of politely _having a word with him_ was gone, it seemed. Then they left him alone.

Sammy rolled the soles of his feet onto the floor, focusing on applying an even pressure. He breathed slowly and steadily. His wrists were bound tightly, but not dangerously so, and he flexed his fingers in turn, rotating his thumb.

They trained you for this kind of thing. He leaned into the training. Staying very present in his body, staying calm. Leaving him on his own like this was a strategy to rattle him; instead, Sammy quietly told himself that it was a gift. The longer they left him alone, the more likely he was to miss the check-in with Ethan. It was hard to judge time accurately in this kind of situation, but it was probable, Sammy thought, that the check-in time had already been and gone.

The surveillance that the team had access to would swing into action as soon as Sammy went missing. It was not a large city and there were few key players. As time stretched on, Sammy counted off seconds in his head. He’d got up to twenty minutes when he heard footsteps in the hall. _If it’s been twenty minutes, the check-in has passed,_ he said to himself. That was because on his way home from the Alami house each afternoon, he would stop at the public phone near his accommodations and make a phone call. He would wait until this call connected and then replace the receiver. He never missed his time.

The door rattled open.

The check-in had passed. It would be fine.

‘Mr Gillespie.’

‘Doctor,’ Sammy corrected him automatically, his accent blessedly holding firm. Two men stood in front of him, both in the ill-fitting suits of low-rent thugs and bodyguards. One carried a small blue canvas bag that swung with a heavy weight. Sammy was so busy cataloguing the suits, the bags, the faces, that he cried out in pained surprise when the first man hit him. A quick slap, open-palmed. His face grew hot with embarrassment and hotter yet under the slap.

‘That was a lie,’ the man said calmly. ‘You will not lie to us any more.’

Would an innocent man say something here? Would an innocent man protest? Sammy decided to keep his mouth shut. He should buy time. That was the strategy.

The first man (tall, muscular, craggy-faced) dragged a chair over and sat in front of Sammy. Their knees were almost touching; they were intimately close. The second man was older, with a livid keloid scar down his face. He stood by the door, canvas bag in hand, staring straight ahead of him.

‘Let’s begin with truths. My name is Amir.’ Amir touched one hand gently to his chest. ‘And yours is…?’

‘John Gillespie,’ Sammy said. Amir tilted his head, and made his eyebrows droop down at the corner.

‘We have your papers,’ he said. He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out the little green leather folder with the gold name, J GILLESPIE, on the front. A tasteful masculine piece in good calfskin. Ethan had a knack for the little touches. ‘The work is very convincing.’ Amir flipped through, holding the passport pages up to the light approvingly.

‘Please,’ Sammy said, his voice strained. No acting required. ‘Tell me what’s going on here.’

‘What’s going on here.’ Amir smiled sharkily. ‘We know that you are not what you seem. We know you have been making phone calls. We know that you have been asking questions that a doctor should not be asking.’

Sammy immediately began turning it all over in his mind. Could someone have been listening in? Was the room bugged? Clearly his probes had not been subtle enough.

‘Is it forbidden to make phone calls?’ he asked.

‘It is strange to make phone calls that you hang up immediately,’ said Amir.

Sammy told himself that if he got out of this alive, he was going to punch Ari in his smug face. Everything was unravelling. Oh yes, it was about that time; the critical point in any Levinson special operation where the haste and the daring became its undoing. _Let’s see what we can do about covert communications,_ Sammy had said. But no, ‘everyone has a phone, Sammy, just call it in.’ So much for Ethan’s promise that the landline would be untraceably routed. The failure point was so much more simple.

Very quickly, Sammy made a calculation. Tangier to Edinburgh; one hour time difference.

‘My mother worries,’ he said. ‘She’s elderly. She just likes to know everything is all right since—since my father died.’

‘A dutiful son.’

‘I try to be.’

‘And she doesn’t want to speak with you, your mother?’

Sammy fumbled some answer about med school, habit, just knowing he was okay was enough. He was aware that he was unfortunately enmeshing himself in lies that strayed from the lie that he had rehearsed and expanded upon it uncomfortably. He didn’t want John Gillespie to be this real. He shouldn’t _need_ John Gillespie to be this real. Lies told under pressure were easily forgotten and flubbed later.

The questions went on.

It was hard to understand exactly what had gone wrong. Sammy didn’t have any particular gift for this line of work. The questions sounded random and insignificant, but as Sammy answered them he had a deep, creeping sense of dread. Amir was building up a picture of him and his activities.

Did he travel often? Had he been to Tangiers before? He was from Edinburgh, yes? Such a beautiful city, Amir had a cousin there. When had he arrived in Tangiers? Had he been here before? Sammy was sure that he had heard some of the questions before. It was disorienting. He knew his accent wasn’t everything that it should be. With every pause and confusion, he became gripped with the feeling that he was sounding less and less convincing.

‘And what day did you arrive?’ Amir asked, still sounding polite, like a customs officer.

‘The ninth,’ Sammy said, sure-not-sure that was correct.

‘Alone?’

‘Of course.’

Amir smiled at him then. The smile wasn’t at all polite.

‘My uncle was right about you: you are a bad liar,’ he said. ‘But I will find the truth.’

‘Your uncle?’ Sammy tried not to stammer it out.

‘How pitiful you were, to think you could exploit an old man. Please. You were watched. You were seen to enter the country with a man we know to be a threat.’

Sammy was slick with sweat under his shirt. Somewhere in the city, Ari would be making his way to Sammy’s accommodation and tracing his location. There was no doubt in Sammy’s mind that Ari could find him. In the early days of his career, before Sammy had known him, Ari had been one of Ethan’s scalphunters. He knew every trick and diversion, every way to locate a target. And with three weeks in Tangiers, he would by now have tapped into a network of informants.

But he would be walking into a trap.

Before Sammy could follow the train of thought further, the pain began. It began and it didn’t stop. They started with his left foot, beating the sole until Sammy could feel the little bones crack. They kept going. Sammy only realised he was screaming when his throat was too raw to make more noise. For a moment they stopped, and Amir leaned in close to evaluate Sammy. Checked his eyes, his breathing.

Sammy sucked in air in wet gulps and tried to pretend his left foot didn’t exist. Amir came to sit by him again. He leaned in solicitously, his vast, muscular upper body turned towards Sammy in an absurd posture of active listening.

'Now. Who was your friend at the airport?'

'I don't know,' Sammy said. His throat hurt. 'A man I met on the plane. We sat together. An anthropologist, I think. Yes.'

The lie came out more easily this time. Strange, when Sammy knew that it was futile. Acid was burning his oesophagus; he was going to throw up. The physical precursor to a single, devastating realisation: Amir and his friend were going to kill him. They would work him and then they would kill him. No subtle strategies here, no sleep deprivation or solitary confinement or blackmail. They would break his bones and beat him, and Sammy would crack, and then they would kill him.

If Ari could find him. Could Ari find him. Sammy resolved to give him as much time as possible. To keep lying and muddying the water. His left foot was grinding agony, but he had survived it. Surely he could survive it again.

But next, Amir grabbed his wrist. His hand, oh god, his hand. His hand; Sammy begged for it not to happen.

‘Oh fuck,’ he said, trying to twist away. ‘Oh fuck, don’t—I’m a surgeon, I need it, I—it’s my job to save lives. Please, don’t do it, don’t—’

With a vicious wrench, Amir snapped his thumb back. Sammy felt more than heard his own hideous shriek. There was more pain, another twisting, convulsive sensation. And then heat, and the smell of burning flesh. Sammy couldn’t breathe, his diaphragm all clenched, his throat burning, burning like his hand. Later, his dentist would remove the cracked pieces of two molars, shaking his head sadly.

They were using tools, Sammy thought. On his knuckles, on his fingernails. Or maybe it was all the same.

Trapped in his personal nightmare, Sammy became so confused that he thought Ari was there. It was very loud in the room suddenly; or was that just the pounding of blood in his ears? Something percussive and relentless. The quality of the light changed. Sammy was still conscious, he thought. But the light was different. Yes, it was different, and the noise stopped.

Ari’s face swam in front of Sammy’s eyes. It was cruel. Ari wasn’t really there.

‘Sammy, get up,’ Ari said, leaning into him to cut the ties on his wrists. Sammy rested his forehead on Ari’s broad shoulder and closed his eyes. ‘Come on, get up.’

Sammy tried, but his legs had turned to water and he couldn’t make them work. Ari spat out a curse in Yiddish and got his arm around Sammy, pulling him up. All Sammy could do was cling to him and try not to let his knees buckle.

‘Exfil?’ Sammy asked through his bruised lips.

‘Kinda. We have to get to the harbour. Let’s move.’

Ari became the sun around which Planet Sammy orbited; all Sammy could do was focus on him, his bulk and his loping stride and his iron grip around Sammy’s chest. Everything else was a hot swirling fog of pain. They tilted drunkenly through the corridors and out the back of the building into a courtyard. Sammy’s eyes were trying to slide closed. Ari pushed him into a car. An old car. It smelled old. Sammy slumped forward in the passenger seat until his forehead rested on the dashboard.

Movement, driving. Ari saying something and then something else. The flicker of motion outside the window. Sammy vomited convulsively on the floor between his feet.

‘Shit,’ Ari hissed. The engine was choking up, rattling. He came to a rolling stop on the side of the road. ‘Sammy, we’re walking from here.’ He leaped out of the car and half-dragged Sammy out of the passenger door. Sammy groaned through his teeth as his foot hit the ground. They were walking. He had to walk.

Whenever Sammy thought about Tangiers later, the memories were ragged and hard to hold on to. Some images came to him with absolute clarity; the smell of a particular blend of herbs, for example, or the way the old wooden floor in his bedroom creaked. Or the startlingly beautiful burst of sunset pink across the sky, which he had noticed even though he was so badly in shock that he didn’t understand what they were doing in Tangiers.

‘Where are we going?’ It was hard to get the words out. He had to force them through his lips, which felt numb, like he’d just had dental surgery.

‘We’re getting out of here, Sammy.’ Ari was practically carrying him, his arm around Sammy’s chest, Sammy’s left foot dragging and bouncing along. They were in a courtyard near a fountain. The water was spilling over and over and over, so pink it was winelike, bloodlike. Sammy wanted to stop and touch it, and then he remembered his hand and whimpered.

He bled his way through the old medina, Ari cutting back and forth through the winding streets. Sammy felt sick, so sick, and he begged Ari to stop.

‘I need to sit down.’ His eyes kept trying to close.

‘You can’t,’ Ari told him. Pressed down the length of his left side, Sammy could feel Ari’s chest heaving like a bellows. He slumped against it. ‘No, come on,’ said Ari. He was speaking very quickly and urgently for some reason. ‘Come on, get your feet under you.’

‘It’s raining,’ Sammy said as they set off again. He could feel the water.

‘No it isn’t,’ panted Ari. But Sammy could feel the water. He tried to lift his arm to show Ari, look, there’s water running down my side. ‘Jesus, Sammy, keep pressure on it.’ Ari stopped and pressed Sammy’s hand back under his armpit. Another flash of pain, so bad it made Sammy’s knees buckle.

They were moving downhill, down towards the water. Sammy had read that once, or learned it somewhere. Downhill meant you were going towards water. He could hear it all around him in an endless rushing sound. It sounded like a heartbeat. He had thought it was raining but now he understood that the water was from the sea. He closed his eyes and let himself be dragged under.

* * *

_Naval vessel _Tarshish_, Mediterranean Sea_

The world came back, rushing up at Sammy at high speed. He blinked, disoriented; the collection of sounds and smells and sensations was foreign and yet not, reassuring and yet uncomfortable. An incessant beeping and a low, throbbing hum that was vibrating the bed he was lying on. He hurt but it somehow didn’t bother him. As his eyes adjusted to being open, he saw endless white and felt crisp, cool linen under his cheek. Hanging right in front of his face was a red switch; a morphine switch.

The pieces fell into place. He was on a Navy vessel, in the infirmary. Very slowly he took stock of his body. His feet were immobile and a tight, annoying itch was irritating his legs up to his calf. Plastered and set, then. His legs ached, his stomach and back were bruised. He found he could bring his left hand to his face to rub his eyes. The right was heavily bandaged and Sammy had a horrible moment of vertigo as he remembered what had happened to it. And then there was the nauseous ache of a concussion.

On the nightstand was a cup of water, and he reached for it and drank it off thirstily. That was briefly comforting, until he tried to put the cup back and missed. It clattered to the floor and rolled back and forth with the movement of the ship.

‘Everything okay?’ An orderly came in, neat in a pressed white jacket. He rescued the cup, gave Sammy a new one. ‘You’ve got a morphine feed here. You can press the button for pain relief.’

‘I know how it works,’ Sammy said irascibly. It came out a raw croak. ‘Where are we?’

‘Making our way through the Med. We’re just off Malta, almost home. We’ll get you to a real hospital.’

‘Sit me up.’

‘Sure.’ The orderly slid the back of the bed higher and helped Sammy readjust. He always hated being flat on his back like that. ‘Levinson wants to see you.’

‘Great,’ Sammy said. The sarcasm clearly didn’t translate through the painkillers, because the orderly went away and then Ari arrived ten minutes later.

‘You look like shit,’ said Ari, sitting on the edge of the bed. He sounded so fond that Sammy’s heart lurched. He had showered and found fresh clothes, so that as always he looked in his element.

‘I feel like shit.’

‘At least you’re alive.’

‘Thanks for getting me out.’

Ari waved his hand dismissively. ‘It wasn’t supposed to go down like this,’ he said. His brow furrowed. ‘We made some mistakes along the way.’

‘Do you fucking think so,’ said Sammy rhetorically.

‘Been thinking about it, and I know exactly where we went wrong.’ Ari settled more comfortably on the mattress, leaning his elbow on the rail at the foot of the bed.

‘We’re doing this now?’

Ari looked at Sammy appraisingly. ‘Thought I’d use the downtime,’ he said. ‘Saves us debriefing back home.’

‘Yeah, because I’m going to be in the fucking hospital,’ Sammy said. It was hard to think of the words and string them together. Everything was very fuzzy, apart from the red-hot ember of irritation that Sammy felt was always banked and ready to flare up again with the least provocation.

‘The doctor says you’ll be fine,’ said Ari. He patted Sammy’s knee.

Sammy reached for the morphine switch and pressed the button. Within seconds a pleasing kind of lassitude washed over him and he closed his eyes, letting Ari’s voice fade into the background until it rumbled to a stop.

* * *

_June 1975, Jerusalem_

‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ The walk across Sammy’s apartment to open the door to Ari’s frenzied knocking had already taken it out of him. He was leaning against the doorframe.

‘Yes, you do,’ said Ari happily. They hadn’t seen each other for three weeks. Ari had a touch of sunburn on his nose, but it had been overcast in Jerusalem since they’d returned from Tangiers. He was buzzing with the kind of energy that he got from pulling off a win, so Ethan had no doubt turned him around and packed him off for another job while Sammy had been in hospital.

Sammy stuffed down the tiny spark of joy that lit him up from the inside as he realised that _that_ was why Ari hadn’t come to see him in the hospital. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to, it was that he couldn’t.

‘I’m tired, Ari,’ he said. Tired of Ari’s antics in the field, tired of trying to rationalise to himself why it somehow wasn’t Ari’s fault. Tired of trying to pull himself together every morning, tired of changing his own dressings and seeing the post-operative wreckage of his hand and foot. Tired of trying.

‘I have something that’ll perk you up,’ said Ari, and he squeezed past Sammy into the apartment.

‘Ari.’

Ari ignored Sammy and went into the kitchen. There was distinctly the sound of beer bottles clinking into the fridge, and then the cupboards opening and closing. The hum and rattle of the microwave.

‘Come on,’ Ari called. ‘I brought food and beer.’

Sammy slunk into the kitchen and sat down at the table. He let Ari put a bowl of chicken soup in front of him, the matzo balls bobbing to the top.

‘Sarah made this,’ he said, seeing her touch in it.

‘Yeah, she’s busy with the baby but she sends her love.’

‘Thanks. I appreciate that.’ Sarah had two functioning hands, an exceptionally pretty face, and had just given Ari a perfect, healthy baby girl. She was a wonderful woman. She had graduated from Sammy’s alma mater eight years after him, top of her class. She still wasn’t enough for Ari, who had come over to play house with him. They would probably fuck later, he and Ari, or at least Ari would try to. That was the only thing that stopped Sammy from hating her. Ari treated her as badly as he treated Sammy.

‘When are you gonna settle down, Sammy?’ Ari stirred his soup, sending a little of the broth over the edge of the bowl.

_When you settle down with me, asshole,_ Sammy thought.

‘I work too much,’ he said instead.

‘Excuses, excuses.’ Ari shoved an overflowing spoon of soup into his mouth and then reached behind him to the freezer compartment of Sammy’s fridge to rescue a couple of beers before they exploded. He opened the bottles with the edge of his car key. ‘I love being married. Here you go.’

A piece of chicken caught on the edge of Sammy’s throat and he coughed it free and washed it down with beer. There was a delicious irony in the idea of choking to death on Ari’s wife’s pity soup. Ari was almost finished, talking as he ate about his daughter, and fatherhood, and which of the office typing pool Sammy should make a play for.

Eventually Sammy forced the last perfect spoonfuls of homemade broth down his throat, and they nursed a beer each and then another. Sammy cracked a yawn. Soup had done nothing to perk him up and he said so.

‘No, there’s something else.’

‘I need to take my painkillers anyway,’ Sammy said, and hauled himself upright on the edge of the table.

‘Better than painkillers.’ Ari intercepted him on the way across the kitchen. ‘Come on.’ He grabbed Sammy’s bicep and steered him towards the bedroom.

‘I’m too tired.’

‘You won’t be.’ Effervescent with delight, Ari manhandled Sammy down onto the bed. Sammy closed his eyes. ‘No, none of that.’

‘I don’t want—’

‘Look, Sammy.’ Ari climbed into bed with him and propped himself up on one elbow. In one hand he had a packet of white powder.

‘Coke? Seriously?’

‘My treat,’ said Ari magnanimously, clearly misunderstanding or pretending too. ‘You deserve some fun.’

Sammy stared at him, wondering where to start in his ritual protests: we spend half our lives trying to stop drug trades and now you’re putting money in dealers’ pockets; cocaine puts stress on the heart; if Ethan finds out he’ll fire you again; if Ethan finds out he’ll fire _me_; I’m not in the mood; you’re an asshole and a cheat; I love you and I don’t want to tell you while I’m under the influence.

‘Jesus, Ari,’ he said instead. Ari carefully peeled open the package with his thumbnail.

‘I think it’s okay if you don’t mix it with painkillers,’ he said. ‘I’m always okay, anyway.’

‘No kidding.’ Sammy watched Ari sharply inhale a little pile up his nostril, sniffing it off his thumb. He leaned in, pressing up against Sammy. Unable to help himself, Sammy leaned a little closer and breathed in the smell of his soap and skin, as familiar as the smell when he walked into his own apartment after weeks away.

‘Yeah,’ said Ari happily. He shuffled closer to Sammy on his elbow. Then he reached out and ran the back of his hand down Sammy’s cheek. Sammy closed his eyes. He felt the soft drag of Ari’s thumb across his mouth, and resisted the temptation to open up for it. Sammy’s whole body was sinking into the mattress. His head tipped back. With great effort, he stopped his jaw from relaxing open.

‘Ari,’ he started to say, thinking about telling him some of the things; the things that he kept private, because to say one of them would be to let slip all of them, and Ari _loved being married_.

‘Hey, open up,’ said Ari, nudging Sammy’s lower lip. He leaned in, a rustle of bedsheets, and kissed him. Little warm pecks, and then the rub of Ari’s nose against his cheek. Ari sniffed, and then told him again, ‘open up, come on.’

Sammy peeled his eyes open to the sight of Ari’s face, happy, flushed. The coke was hitting and his pupils were dark and wide. Sammy wasn’t even high but he thought he could feel himself falling into them and never coming back out. He opened his mouth, and Ari pushed his thumb into it. There was the bitter, grainy feel of coke on his tongue, and the press and slide of Ari’s thumb. In a moment his tongue was numb and all he could feel was pressure, and the corner of his mouth hanging up on Ari’s skin.

Another pressure, Ari’s fingers under the waistband of Sammy’s pants. His strong, rough hand on Sammy’s cock, coaxing him to get hard. Getting him there.

‘You deserve to have fun,’ Ari told him. Sammy could hear him grinning but he couldn’t look. He gazed off at the wall. He felt as though his body were weightless, except for his hand and foot that weighed him down like concrete blocks. The aching pull of Ari’s hand was doing little for him. He screwed his eyes closed. It would be easier to come than to explain to Ari why he couldn’t. Ari didn’t take failure well.

‘Talk to me,’ Sammy said, and Ari did, a long running sentence of meaningless dirty talk. The bed shook with the pumping of Ari’s hand. Guilted into generosity, Sammy fumbled for him and reciprocated.

When Sammy finally came, miserable and lightheaded, the contraction of his foot made him moan in something like pain. Pain, as if he had a real body. As if he weren’t just a disconnected, floating, weightless thing.

‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Ari whispered to him, hot and close to his ear. ‘Don’t stop, don’t—’

* * *

_Ethiopia, 1979_

Sammy hadn’t wanted the Ethopia job, really, and yet of course he had. He’d been bored, sidelined. Put on the list of compromised, injured or otherwise damaged operatives who were last on the list for the choice jobs. Not that he wanted the jobs. But it would have been insulting, if he had.

Okay, he did.

Ari wanted him there, as always. And that meant that Ethan pulled strings and Sammy pulled medical duty.

‘You and me again, Sammy, like old times.’ Ari grinned at him as they crossed the airfield to the prop plane idling on the runway. Sammy busied himself with adjusting the strap on his backpack and didn’t answer. He didn’t answer as they settled into the narrow bucket seats on the plane and buckled up, or as they took off and rattled into the sky. He looked out the window and watched the vast expanse of sea below him, and tried to ignore that he was sick with fear and worry in a way that exceeded any other pre-mission nerves he’d ever had.

He flexed his hand on the seat, testing the range of motion.

‘It won’t be like that this time,’ Ari told him quietly. For a moment, Sammy could almost believe it. He grimaced at Ari, and then Ari burst into his usual effusive laugh. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure gone?’

‘Left it in Tangiers, didn’t I?’

‘You’ll get it back,’ said Ari. He was fishing around in his bag, not looking at Sammy. He pulled out a flask. ‘C’mon, let’s drink to it.’

Sammy took it and tried not to let his misery show on his face. It wasn’t good whiskey; it burned the roof of his mouth. But the way Ari grinned at him as he took his flask back and drank from it made it worth it. God help him, but he loved to make Ari happy, whatever the cost.

In Ethiopia, Ari found a kindred spirit in Kabede Bimro. Two of them, Sammy thought despairingly after their first meeting, where he watched their contact wax poetical about the promised land. As always, Sammy’s role was largely to be present in case of disaster. To be present, and not to complain about the plan, or Ari’s endless changes to the plan, or his madcap, last-minute, desperate strategic changes based on the whims of his emotions and his saviour complex. At least Kabede had an excuse, Sammy thought bitterly, watching the two of them huddled over a map and talking animatedly. At least these were Kabede's people.

‘I don’t want to be a naysayer,’ said Sammy eventually, two twin glares. ‘But if you’re planning on staging through a refugee camp we need to move people through fast. As soon as the population builds up there’ll be problems. Disease, hunger. Probably babies being born.’ He traced his finger along the planned exit route from Ethiopia, and on to the coast. ‘This is a turnaround of weeks. We’re being too ambitious with numbers.’

‘Are you suggesting we leave my people to die?’ asked Kabede.

‘Yeah, that’s great, Sammy,’ said Ari, ‘we’ll just let those pregnant women take their chances. Much better than temporarily housing them in a refugee camp.’

‘What’s the point in bringing a doctor if you don’t listen to medical advice?’ asked Sammy, but quietly, because he didn’t want to start another fight. They turned back to their map.

Everything unfolded exactly how Sammy predicted it would. Days and weeks jammed into a series of barely-functioning vehicles, back and forth across a land torn by poverty and drought and civil war. On constant high alert. They had no base of operations. It was too risky to be seen anywhere more than once; they were memorable because they were so visibly strangers. And people had a tendency to connect multiple strange occurrences. So when a bunch of people suddenly disappeared the day after some white people had been in the area—well, even Ari knew that was bad strategy. Never safe, never secure, they kept on the road.

It was everything Sammy hated; loose planning, no contingency plans, ducking in and out of firefights and close calls and scrapes with no real chance of rescue.

Except.

Except that it was him and Ari, half the time just the two of them. Crammed into an old British military Jeep and unplugging the dash lighting so they could buzz along unnoticed at night. Trading off turns driving, with the other handing over food or water, or singing to help them both stay awake. Or desperately trying to get a decrepit truck working again, and then Ari noticing the battery unplugged and both of them falling into helpless, tired laughter at the mistake. Or midnight, in a gulley sheltered by an overhang, making a little contained fire in an old coffee can to boil water. It got very cold at night, and they were pressed together shoulder to thigh, talking in whispers and handing a tin cup of coffee back and forth.

In those brief respites between fear and chaos and adrenaline, Sammy selfishly gloried in being the only other person in Ari Levinson’s world.

_You’re mine,_ he would think quietly, gleefully, as Ari whispered to him, only him, and their fingers touched around the cup.

Of course, the luck ran out in the end. Surprisingly, it was the first time that Sammy had been arrested. Surprising because of the amount of time he spent with Ari, who absolutely _had_ been arrested before. To be crammed into a small room with a bunch of other men, all of them reeking of sweat and dirt, wasn’t an experience he cared to repeat. After Tangiers, he hadn’t thought that something like this would faze him.

Ari showily hung from the bars along the top of the cell and did pull ups. Everyone else ignored him. Sammy envied him. He himself was anxious, waiting for some kind of resolution. It was hard to see how any would come.

_Carefree motherfucker,_ he thought in Ari’s direction. Ari dropped back down to the floor, bending his knees like a gymnast. As if he’d been knocked off his bar by the viciousness of Sammy’s thought.

‘You okay?’ He came to sit back down next to Sammy.

‘Fine.’ Sammy didn’t want to talk about any of it.

In the end, it was easy to walk away. To leave Ari confused at the airport and return to the clinic where, if nothing else, Sammy knew that his days would pass with the kind of efficient regularity that Ari could never endure or even understand. His nurses were almost pathetically pleased to see him again; was this how Ari felt all the time? Sammy was magnanimous and warm, and king of his own little kingdom. It passed for contentment, mostly.

Ari phoned a couple of times. In the evenings, when Sammy was home and eating his dinner.

Twice in a week, and then nothing for a fortnight. Then again—he sounded tired—and nothing for a while. And then an animated call; everything was going well, everything with the project he couldn’t talk about on an unsecured line.

‘Your uncle says hello,’ Ari told him, at the end of his first monologue. Sammy was recovering from it, bracing himself for the next one as he carefully stirred some onions in butter at the bottom of a pan. _Uncle_ was Ethan: Ari was implying that Ethan was talking about Sammy, and that there might be a job involved.

‘How’s the little one?’ Sammy asked instead, picking at an old wound.

‘Oh, man. She’s not really little any more. She’s a kid, a person all of her own, you know?'

‘I know. And Sarah?’

Ari paused, ignored the question and posed his own. ‘Want to come over? I’m back home for a while.’

Sammy said a bunch of stupid, disconnected stuff about work and his busy, busy life. Somehow it was worse when Ari did the thing where he pretended Sarah didn’t exist. He tucked the phone under his chin to add chopped tomatoes to the pan.

‘Are you cooking?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Anything good?’ Ari asked, angling for an invite.

_Fuck you,_ Sammy thought venomously. ‘Using up some stuff in the fridge. Weeknight dinner.’

‘Guess I’ll let you do that,’ said Ari. He sounded so hangdog that Sammy almost cracked and invited him over.

‘Talk to you later, Ari,’ he said instead, and put the phone back on the hook before Ari could reply. He was surprised, that time, how angry he still was at Ari.

When Ari upped the ante and showed up at Sammy’s clinic, Sammy wanted to be able to retain that anger. Who the hell did he think he was? That was the logical response. For a moment, Sammy tried to make the rage work. But Ari was in fine form, laughing and flirting, and Sammy had missed him. That was always the thing. Ari knew how long he needed to stay away before Sammy started forgiving him. Probably he wasn’t even aware of it. Some internal calibration or sensor pinged, and he’d walk right back into Sammy’s life like he’d never fucked up.

Walking in with his casual, ‘Calm down, I need to talk to you.’

With his little jibe about Sammy’s clinic, _save a lot of lives here?_, as if that were the only way to measure a man’s worth. Ari always had been unable to see the beauty and value in the mundane act. It was presumably why he tried to avoid mundanity at all cost.

‘I know how to get ‘em out, Sammy.’ Sammy didn’t have to ask who. ‘I got a plan. And it’s good.’

‘Yes, that’s what you always say—until everything goes to shit.’

‘Just hear me out. You don’t like what I got to say, I’m gone.’

Sammy braced himself.

‘Ari. Ari, no.’

Ari looked up at him in the midst of scrabbling documents out of his satchel. Confused, as always, by the concept of ‘no’.

‘What, you don’t wanna hear the plan?’ Ari’s whole face broke into a bemused grin, apparently delighting in another chance to drag Sammy down the path of most stupidity. ‘You’d rather be here than in the field?’

The inevitable conversation followed: yes, Sammy would rather be here in the field; no, he was not the _best field doctor_ that Ari or anybody else knew. Sammy curled his broken hand under, out of Ari’s gaze. And then, ruinously, Ari turned that same gaze on Sammy’s face.

‘I need you on this one. I can’t do it without you.’

Sammy almost pulled it off. Ari got half way back towards the clinic waiting room before the tidal wave of memories and desire swept Sammy into another bad decision.

Right when he thought he'd finally kicked the habit.

'Fine, I’ll listen,' he said. ‘But only out of curiosity, because I’m still going to say no.’ He was. He was going to say no.

Ari surged back up the hall. 'Not here,' he said.

'My shift isn't over for another two hours.'

'Aren't you the boss?' Ari grinned. 'Say it's an emergency.'

'It's not an emergency,' Sammy said sternly. 'I'm not even really interested. I'm just curious to know what scheme you've cooked up this time. Call it an academic interest.'

Ari leaned in close so that only Sammy could hear him. 'You're gonna love it,' he said. His breath stirred the fine hairs on Sammy's neck, and every cell in Sammy's body felt distinctly as though it was straining towards Ari's mouth. 'It'll be the wildest thing we've ever pulled off.'

Sammy refrained from pointing out that the job wasn't by any means going to be pulled off, or that there was no 'we'. He was concerned that if he unclenched his jaw, his teeth would start chattering from pure repressed want. Instead, he ducked across the hallway to reception, shaking off the lingering feeling of Ari's proximity.

'Sorry, Rebecca, I've got to leave. It's an emergency.'

'Shall I mark you as out for the rest of the day?'

'Yes, and ask Levi if he can cover my patients.'

'Okay, Sammy. I hope it's nothing serious.' She looked between Sammy and Ari who, blessedly, had adopted a serious expression.

'It probably won't come to anything,' said Sammy, just to be obnoxious. Next to him he could almost feel Ari's urge to comment. He smiled internally.

‘I walked over,’ Ari said as they left the building.

‘Now I have to give you a lift, too?’

Ari shrugged, clutching his satchel close to his body. ‘You don’t have to. We could go somewhere public.’

Already Sammy was near-lightheaded from the certainty that they were going to fuck. ‘Obviously not,’ he said, trying to fight it. Yet he reached over to open the passenger side door for Ari, and drove them home by the most direct route.

In his apartment, they sat kitty-corner at his kitchen table with Ari’s thigh pressed warmly and obviously to Sammy’s own. Ari ran him through the plan; an old hotel, legitimately owned and operated, and a team of Seals on standby. Sammy felt the old familiar twinge of nervous excitement. He wanted it. Lord, he wanted it. It must have shown in his face.

‘You’ll do it,’ Ari said triumphantly.

‘I didn’t say.’

‘But you will.’

‘Ari, you’re a fucking menace.’

Ari’s arm slid across the back of Sammy’s chair. He got his mouth under the edge of Sammy’s jaw and nipped at it. One hand came up to loosen Sammy’s tie. ‘You’ll do it.’

‘What if I don’t?’

‘I’ll convince you,’ Ari said, his mouth finding Sammy’s earlobe. Sammy groaned. Ari knew all his weak points. In a moment, his tie was on the floor and Ari was working on his shirt buttons.

‘No, Ari,’ he said, lying, his hands half pushing Ari away and half pulling him closer. ‘This is stupid.’

‘What’s stupid?’ Ari’s voice was muffled against Sammy’s neck.

‘Do you know that you’re married?’

‘Sarah left me,’ Ari said casually, as if he was commenting on the weather.

Sammy pulled away for real. ‘Fucking hell, Ari. When?’

Ari shrugged. ‘When we were away. She left a voicemail. It’s not important.’

‘How is it not important?’ In moments like these, Sammy almost envied Ari’s outsized ability to compartmentalise. His wife leaving him wouldn’t compromise his operational effectiveness one bit—nor his relentless seduction of Sammy. But then, if Sammy never spoke to Ari again, likely Ari would be just as little affected.

‘It was a long time coming,’ Ari said. He grabbed Sammy’s wrist. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

Helplessly, Sammy let himself be drawn through the apartment to the bedroom, let Ari push him down onto the mattress. Their bodies were melting together like wax, fitting together, as perfectly as they ever had done. As perfectly as they always did. Sammy’s hands moved as thought he didn’t control them. He closed his eyes, didn’t have to look to find Ari’s buttons and his belt buckle.

Had it been like this for Sarah? He had to assume not, or she wouldn’t have left. Or perhaps she was just a stronger person. Smarter.

‘Where are you?’ Ari said, his voice blurry and soft against Sammy’s mouth.

‘I’m here,’ Sammy lied, dragging himself back to the present; or rather, back to a better version of the present, where he wasn’t thinking about Ari’s wife.

‘Move your knee.’

‘Ari—’

‘Shh.’

Sammy twisted and fretted under Ari’s hands. Ari knew exactly what to do about that. He liked to be the sole focus of Sammy’s attention, so he made it that way. Sliding down the mattress, which sagged awkwardly in the middle. Getting his mouth on the point of Sammy’s hip and following the line of muscle down, down, hot and eager. Yet even with Ari’s fist around his cock, and Ari’s tongue and lips working him over, Sammy wasn’t entirely present. A little part of his brain was working away, running the mission details.

And a yet smaller part was whispering with vicious intent, _he’s going to get you killed_.

‘Does it matter,’ Sammy said aloud.

Ari pulled off and looked at him, his pupils very wide.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Don’t stop.’

‘Come with me,’ Ari murmured, his warm mouth pressed into the little soft spot on the inside of Sammy’s thigh.‘It’ll be you and me.’

Sammy turned his head and buried his face in the pillow. He didn’t have to say anything. The answer was always going to have been yes.


End file.
